L.5 Investigating the Relationship between Image and Text in Illustrated Books, Part 1

Fri Nov 4 / 12:40 – 14:10 EDT

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Larissa Vilhena, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

The inherently interdisciplinary character of research into illustrated books, which comprises the fields of visual culture, literary criticism and illustration studies, permeates any attempt to study nineteenth-century illustrated editions of prose and verse. From the 1850s to the 1870s the Victorian ‘gift book’ proved extremely popular among the British middle-class readership. As a remarkable legacy of the Victorian era, the illustrated book influenced a wide range of artists, engravers and writers far beyond Britain and well into the twentieth century.

This session seeks to study the relationship between image and text in illustrated books. The main questions addressed are to what extent the visual is informed by the verbal and, conversely, how far the text is influenced by the image on the page. We welcome submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers to discuss illustrated volumes from any cultures from either the nineteenth or the twentieth century.

keywords: illustration, image, text, illustrated, book

L.5.1 What the Written Scripts Foretell: Reimagining and Redefining Image-Text Relation in Mutua Bahadur’s Illustrated Manuscripts of Manipur

Natasa Thoudam, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India

This paper interrogates the practice of illustrative arts that informs the production of astrological manuscripts among the Meitei community of Manipur in India’s Northeast region. In fact, Mutua Bahadur, who is a compiler of these manuscripts and has collected, documented, and studied them, dates them back to the reign of the Meitei Maharaja Garib Niwaz (reign: 1709–48). Simultaneously, the Meitei community, similar to many cultures in this region, is embedded in a rich heritage of oral tradition. Yet, the community already had a written script (Meitei Mayek) and books written in it that date back to as early as 11th and 12th century. In the light of this different culture that allows the co-existence of the oral and the written, this paper explores and examines the relationship between image and text in these illustrative astrological manuscripts while reimagining and redefining their relation using Bahadur’s Illustrated Manuscripts of Manipur.

keywords: Bahadur’s Illustrated Manuscripts of Manipur, Meitei, Manipur, India’s Northeast

Natasa Thoudam works at the intersection of literary, gender, and religious studies with a focus on Manipur in India’s Northeast. Her doctoral research was on women’s writing on political violence in Manipur. She has published research and presented conference papers focussed on Manipur. She was awarded the CD Narasimhaiah Prize for best paper read at India’s Northeast–focussed Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Annual Conference in 2017. She was a recipient of the first batch of Zubaan–Sasakawa Peace Foundation Grant for Young Researchers from the Northeast (2018–19). The output of this project was an e-essay in the form of a graphic narrative that inaugurates her formal entry into the world of (graphic) artists. She is currently working on her second graphic narrative. She has also developed a recent interest in digital humanities and wishes to explore this emerging field in studies on India's Northeast.

L.5.2 Certificates of Presence: Authorial Portraits and the Orientalist Travelogue

Stéphanie Hornstein, Concordia University

As a form of writing, travelogues are first-person accounts that present a given place as seen through the eyes of a specific interpreter. With the advent of steam-powered locomotion and improved printing technologies in the nineteenth century, this genre experienced a marked shift. No longer limited to an aristocratic elite, long-distance travel was now in reach of a greater swath of society whose desire to show themselves as cultured made them eager to share their impressions of far-off lands. Moreover, book publishers’ implementation of the half-tone printing process enabled the reproduction of photographs in books with large-scale print runs, leading to a veritable flourishing of illustrated travel writing and an increasing need for authors to distinguish themselves from their peers.

Focussing primarily on travellers who wrote about Egypt and Japan, this paper proposes to explore the ways in which authorial portraits, frequently included as frontispieces at the beginning of travelogues, served as testaments to the writer’s persona. Since travelogues are a highly personal form of life writing, the value of the views expressed is judged by the reader according to their impression of the writer themselves. Images of self-representation, then, are key to building a bond of trust between the author and the arm-chair traveller. Attention will be dedicated to the performative nature and symbolic attributes of authorial portraiture, especially as these relate to the Victorian quality of “worldliness.” In particular, I will highlight the tendency for authors to portray themselves in foreign dress, partaking in what Marie-Cecile Thoral has dubbed “sartorial Orientalism.” Overall, the authorial portraits under discussion will be interpreted as “certificates of presence”—strategic tools used by the author to validate their written testimony as an eyewitness account.

keywords: illustrated travelogue, authorial portrait, photography, worldliness

Stéphanie Hornstein is a course instructor and PhD candidate in the department of Art History at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. Her doctoral research is concerned with tracing patterns in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travel photographs of the broad region which was designated by Westerners as the “Orient.” Her particular focus is on themes that are common to photographic representations of Japan and Egypt. Her writing has appeared in Ciel variable, History of Photography, and RACAR, among other publications. She is currently the coordinating editor for a book series organized by the research group Formes actuelles de l’expérience photographique. She is also Concordia Library’s Researcher-in-Residence for the 2022-2023 year.

L.5.3 Robert Burford’s panorama programmes: popular ephemera compiling the world before the Murrays

Gonzalo Munoz-Vera, McGill University

From the Renaissance onwards, architecture and images began a long tradition in disseminating the discipline’s discourses. However, architectural publications—particularly treatises—were of limited public access because of production costs since they involved demanding printing processes when images appeared. This issue changed by the mid-nineteenth century when printing techniques evolved and illustrated newspapers and popular publications became available to the masses.

While most of the studies centre on the period after the dawn of illustrated news and photography, there is previous material that fed the minds of popular audiences earlier in that century in Europe, particularly in England: the panorama programmes. These prints served as guidebooks for panorama exhibitions, containing written descriptions and miniaturized canvas versions. These ephemera represent the extant primary source of panoramas, reuniting accounts of several worldwide cities before global mass tourism and transportation. The programmes offered an affordable medium distributed at the panorama venues, complementing a silent image on display which in turn validated the written and visual content through highly realistic paintings arranged in an unprecedented 360-degree immersive illusion. The yearly programmes accompanied the visual display of remote locations mostly reached through imperial expeditions that were only mentioned in books or storytelling before. These prints preceded Murray’s (1836) and Baedeker’s (1860) guidebooks and showed how to compile a city’s history and landmarks in about fifteen pages by assembling existing literature and personal notes.

This paper will examine the programmes of Mexico City (1826) and Lima (1836) as two Latin-American cityscapes which Robert Burford—the panorama owner—never visited. Instead, the cities' accounts were collected from the few literature available, and third parties produced the sketches onsite. In this paper, I argue that images and texts complement each other to create and sustain an undisputed narrative and image of the world, therefore forming biased ideas in European audiences on different cultures, particularly from colonies.

keywords: panorama, programme, architecture, cityscape, guidebook

Gonzalo Munoz-Vera (Santiago, 1981) is a Contract Instructor at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism and Adjunct Professor (honorary rank) at the School of Industrial Design at Carleton University, and PhD candidate at McGill University School of Architecture. Since 2005 he has studied the influence of images as a globalizing tool for shaping cultures and cities through aesthetics and appearances, which has excluded dissented and minority voices from playing a representative role in the city. Based in Montreal, his doctoral research studies the role of visuals in the construal of cities and cultures in a nineteenth-century Western visuality installing the foundations of current seeing conventions. He has been the recipient of BecasChile Doctoral Scholarship from the Chilean government, Fulbright, the Schulich Excellence Fellowship at McGill University, among other awards. He has been Guest Lecturer and Studio Instructor in schools of architecture in Chile, Colombia, and at McGill University.